Brooklyn Neighborhood Gets an ‘I Know You!’ Moment

The NY1 anchor Pat Kiernan and his wife, Dawn, said they were not looking to move when they discovered their new home.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Bedford Avenue, the main artery of Northside Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is lined with artisanal restaurants, crowded bars and, on any given Saturday night, a multitude of drunken people. While it is unarguably a destination for revelry, it is not typically known as a celebrity refuge.

Yet there is a new and quite recognizable neighbor on that street: Pat Kiernan, the morning news anchor at NY1, who has just bought a house a few short blocks north of the Bedford stop on the L train, right there on the main drag.

Mr. Kiernan and his family, who now live in a penthouse on the Upper West Side, are crossing the bridge at an auspicious moment. Mr. Kiernan has spent the last year lobbying to fill Regis Philbin’s seat on “Live! With Kelly,” and he has had a handful of guest host appearances on the morning show in the last two months. It is precisely this timing that helps make Mr. Kiernan’s move seem, on the face of it, rather odd.

Here he is, a local celebrity, pounding on the door of one of the most coveted jobs in broadcasting, the glitter of national-talk-show fairy dust sprinkled in his neat blond hair. And there he goes, moving from a fabulous penthouse on the Upper West Side to a house with vanilla-colored siding that is across the street from a hardware store and costs half as much as the place where he lives now.

No, the choice is not obvious. But on a walk through their new home on a rainy afternoon last week, Mr. Kiernan and his wife, Dawn, explained that at first sight, the house, its garden, the neighborhood and even the L train got under their skin.

“We’re under no illusions that it could be confused with a trophy property from the front,” Mr. Kiernan said, explaining that the location and the pristine interior were much more important to them. “We’re not trying to build a showy property. We just want a comfortable place to live with our family.”

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The house is not "a trophy property from the front," Mr. Kiernan said.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

And it will be comfortable, indeed.

The kitchen opens up into an immense back garden, all warm reddish brick and leafy trees. The couple’s daughters, Lucy, 10, and Maeve, 7, will have their own floor. And the 2,600-square-foot home was fully renovated just over a year ago by a family that planned to stay for the long haul, Mr. Kiernan said. The structural steel, the plumbing, the electrical systems — all were spruced up.

The Kiernans, who are Canadian, insist that they were not looking to move when they saw an intriguing advertisement for a fully renovated single-family home right near the L train. That is the closest subway line to their daughters’ school, the United Nations International School, which is in a deeply inconvenient nether region of the Far East Side, near 25th Street and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.

They visited the house several times and were relieved to find it quieter on the inside than all the late-night Bedford Avenue foot traffic might suggest. They even went by at 10 on a Saturday night. (“We sat on the stoop hoping the current residents wouldn’t notice us there,” Mr. Kiernan said.)

Living on such a heavily used thoroughfare, however, is an issue not only of noise but also of privacy, and Mr. Kiernan is a recognizable face. He has been the morning anchor at NY1 for nearly 15 years and has a devoted, if sometimes ironic, following that cuts across all sorts of demographics and levels of hipness.

“Hey, Pat!” many people call out.

Or: “Hey, New York 1 guy!”

“Having done what I’ve done for 15 years, there’s always an element of being in the fishbowl,” Mr. Kiernan said. “At some point, it’s not particularly relevant which fishbowl it is.”

That said, after a week of attention from real estate bloggers and their readers (“Canadians are not known for their good taste nor real estate savvy,” one comment opined), Mr. Kiernan appeared to tire of the shark tank. Holding up an article about a $14 million home for sale at the border of Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay during his signature “In the Papers” segment, Mr. Kiernan said: “I’m glad there’s a story about somebody else’s house in Brooklyn today.”

The Kiernans bought their four-bedroom home for $2.025 million, the highest price ever paid for a single-family home in Williamsburg, according to Jonathan Miller, president of the Miller Samuel appraisal firm. That makes this moment for Pat Kiernan a moment for the neighborhood, too.

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The location and the garden helped win the family over.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine the man Mr. Kiernan hopes to replace living along the L line. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Philbin and his wife, Joy, moved from the Upper East Side to a building on West 67th Street, right across the street from the ABC studios where “Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee” was filmed. Though Mr. Philbin retired from the show last year, they still live there.

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These days, “young” might not be the first word that springs to mind about the Upper West Side, but the Kiernans, too, have called it home for many years.

Their current apartment, on West 75th Street, was built out of a collection of maid’s rooms and the superintendent’s apartment they bought from the co-op in 2001. Today it has four bedrooms, 800 feet of outdoor space, and an accepted offer from a potential buyer. Mr. Kiernan declined to say how much that offer was for, but he did say they had plenty of interest at its listed price — $3.95 million.

So with an extra $2 million in his pocket, the Kiernans are decamping to Brooklyn.

“It’s going to be good and different,” Ms. Kiernan said, looking out at their new garden with a smile.

“If anyone has brilliant ideas of what to do with the front,” she added, “I would love to hear it.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 8, 2012, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Crossing the Bridge To a Home in Brooklyn. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe